Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

RockMelt: The User Manual

By Paul Boutin November 17, 2010 3:14 pmNovember 17, 2010 3:14 pm

RockMelt’s browser interface.

Last week, a start-up company called RockMelt unveiled a free browser for PCs and Macs, customized for people who live on Facebook, Twitter and other social-networking sites. RockMelt has gotten a lot of attention, because the company’s management and investors include several of the “Netscape mafia” who built the first widely successful browser in the early 1990s, including the Silicon Valley wunderkind Marc Andreessen.

Social-network browsers have been around for years. Flock, another Andreessen investment, is probably the most popular. RockMelt’s novelty is that whereas Flock plants its tools for Facebook, Twitter and other networks right in front of your face, where you can’t miss them, RockMelt’s tools are pushed aside to the margins of the browser window. That means they require some exploring and clicking around to find and figure out. There’s a lot of utility there, but most people won’t find a lot of it. What RockMelt needs is a how-to manual that lists everything it can do. Funnily enough, I’ve created exactly that.

To get started with RockMelt, go to rockmelt.com and click on Connect for an Invitation. You’ll be prompted for your Facebook user name and password (or, if you’re already logged in, you’ll be taken through the automatic Facebook Connect process). If one of your Facebook friends already has RockMelt and has spare invitations to the service, he or she will be notified of your request and can approve you right away. At worst, the company will approve you within a few days.

You’ll get an e-mail with a download link. Download and install the browser. Start it up, and it will prompt you to log in to Facebook, and to give RockMelt the permissions it needs to operate your Facebook account. Once you’ve logged into RockMelt, you can also log in to multiple Twitter accounts.

RockMelt is basically the Chrome browser from Google with four areas of functionality added to the interface: Share, Friends, Apps and Search. Once you’re logged in, in the upper left corner of the browser, you’ll see your Facebook profile photo, with a gray dot that lights up green if you’re signed on to Facebook Chat. To send a status update or a Twitter message, click your picture. RockMelt pops up a little window that lets you type text and also toggle your chat status. (A general rule: RockMelt’s pop-ups don’t have Close buttons on them. To make a pop-up disappear, click anywhere outside it.)

To share a Web page you’re looking at, click the Share button atop the middle of the browser. You can post to your Facebook wall, send a Facebook message or post the URL to Twitter. As with Facebook, you can include an optional thumbnail image from the site. For Twitter, there’s a checkbox option that lets you add your current location to the message.

The Friend Edge, as it’s called, runs down the left side of the browser. It shows which Facebook friends are online, sorted alphabetically by first name. Roll your mouse over a friend’s photo to see the latest status update. Click the picture to pop up a window that lets you send a message, chat or read most recent updates complete with photos and videos inline. There’s also a star-shaped button to add that friend to your list of favorite friends, which you can see by toggling between the star and green-dot buttons atop that edge. You can tear off the friend window by dragging it, so that it becomes a separate application window with its own icon in the Windows taskbar. That lets you keep a conversation open without its interfering with your browser use.

To send a link, picture or video to a friend, drag it from the main browser window to the friend’s picture. A popup window lets you choose whether to post it to their Facebook wall, send it as a Facebook message, or start a Facebook chat session. To edit your favorite friends list, drag them around to reorder them or drag them out of the edge to make them disappear.

The App Edge is on the right side of the screen. The apps are, under the hood, RSS feeds. By default, you’ll see buttons for Facebook and Twitter. Click them to see a fast pop-up of the latest updates on your Facebook News Feed or Twitter main feed.

It’s a lot quicker — and the layout’s cleaner and easier to read — than browsing to Facebook or Twitter to read them. You can add any Web site’s RSS feeds to the App Edge. To do that, go to the page you want to add, then click the green “+” button at the bottom of the App Edge. (If the site doesn’t have any RSS feeds, the button will be grayed out.) RockMelt will pop up a window with the feeds from the current page, plus those from sites you’ve recently visited and those you visit most often. That lets you go back and add a feed later without hunting for it.

The company told me RockMelt is working on adding support for Gmail accounts as apps, so you’ll be able to quickly check Gmail without browsing to it.

The last feature is Search. RockMelt incorporates Chrome’s omnibar, which lets you perform searches and open Web sites by name rather than URL, simply by typing everything into the main search bar atop the browser. But to the right of the omnibar, RockMelt also adds a fast Google search. Instead of displaying your results as a browser page, it pops up a window with a stripped-down list of Google’s first 10 results. Not only that, but it also prefetches each of the pages listed in the results. So you can click on one or scroll through the list with your keyboard’s arrow keys, and see the pages in the main browser window almost instantly.

I’ve tried a lot of Google accelerators, and this implementation is one of the best yet. For a lot of searches, 10 plain-text results are better than a Google page full of images, videos, maps, ads and other distracting content. And scrolling through the list to see each page is more efficient than popping each one open in a separate browser tab, as many people do.

You can hide the Friends and Apps edges by going to the little RockMelt menu at the upper left of the PC interface, or selecting the View menu on a Mac. There’s also a menu option to bring up the browser’s standard bookmarks bar, which RockMelt hides by default. These functions can also be invoked by keyboard commands like Ctrl-Shift-Space to toggle the edges on and off.

Altogether, RockMelt’s goal is to let people keep on top of Facebook, Twitter and Google as quick, efficient side tasks, rather than going to separate sites for each. The company plans to add support for other sharing services, too, like Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn. There are plenty of other social-network-console products already out there, but RockMelt’s clever implementation is worth a spin.

What's Next

About

Gadgetwise is a blog about everything related to buying and using tech products. From figuring out which gadget to buy and how to get the best deal on it to configuring it once it’s out of the box, Gadgetwise offers a mix of information, analysis and opinion to help you get the most out of your personal tech.